Elements of Physiophilosophy

by Lorenz Oken

2749. Every awaking is a resurrection from death, a new sympathizing with the vegetal body, from which the animal body again originates.

2750. As the animal originally took its rise from, and only through the plant, so also is this repeated in an individual. The plant is the ever-living, ever-verdant, or green, out of which the animal daily sprouts forth as a blossom.

2751. The animal intercourse with the world is also interrupted in two ways, and there are therefore two modes of falling asleep.

2752. The first cause resides in the want of stimulus. The nerves of the senses are not polar, do not therefore excite the brain, nor does this again affect the motor system. The muscle therefore arrives at a state of non-tension; it becomes relaxed, and along with it necessarily the organs of sense, which are thrown into activity by muscular motion. The arms and fingers, whose business is to touch, sink down; the feet which move, and thereby warm and animate the body, are slackened and bent together; the body is in the recumbent posture; the eyelids drop, the light no longer plays upon the visual organs, the external and internal auditory muscles flag also, and the sound is no longer borne upon the ear. Now also does the tension of the senses with the brain cease, and with it the sensation—there is sleep.

2753. This sleep arising from want of stimulus is a faint sleep, and rendered useless by dreams. For there is actually no cause present why the encephalic tension should entirely cease. Men, who do not fall asleep through fatigue, but from want of work, sleep restlessly, awake easily, and again readily fall asleep. Their life is dreaming.

2754. The other cause of the polar suppression in the nerves is like that of the extension of the muscles, or their falling to sleep; it is thus the discharge of the too strongly excited poles. With too high a degree of fibrous tension, which also originates through too long a continuance of the tension, the fibre is placed in a state of activity, which consists in the antagonism being balanced by approximation of the ends. Were nerves, when greatly tensed, capable of being shortened, they would also discharge themselves, and come at least for one instant to rest—they would sleep.

2755. The falling asleep of the fibre is its sleep, though it also does not last long. So is the expansion of the heart its sleep, so is expiration the sleep of the thorax.

2756. In all polarizable organs there is a change or alternation of waking and sleeping, which endures a longer and shorter time. This periodicity depends upon the energy of the polar influence, and upon the size and susceptibility of the substance.

2757. Every substance has its own periods of waking and sleeping, of action and repose. The pulse sleeps shorter than the breathing; this again shorter than being hungry; this again for a briefer time than the sexual function.

2758. There are organs, or systems, which are nearly always in a state of slumber, e. g. the osseous system, because in it the polarity is extinguished. It is only in states of inflammation that it wakes up. Others scarcely ever slumber, e. g. the cellular system, because in it indeed no pole is yet fixed, and in the alternation of poles its life consists.